FLEEING refugees and a football outsider.

The British-Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid is best known for The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), a wise, funny book that asked tough questions about America’s response to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Proving that he’s not afraid to keep tackling the big issues that face the world, Hamid’s latest novel is about a pair of refugees who embark on a new life in London, only to find themselves treated like pariahs. What could be more topical?

The book begins in an unnamed Middle Eastern city overrun by refugees from neighbouring war zones and on the brink of invasion. There are rumours that mysterious portals are springing up through which one can simply step into cities in the West – as long as you pay enough cash to the people who know where to find them.

The book focuses on Saeed, an amiable, rather geeky young man, and Nadia, a girl he meets at an evening class. Nadia has defied convention by leaving her parents’ home and living on her own and she is always clad from head to foot in a black robe, not out of piety but to deflect unwanted attention. On the brink of falling in love, the pair decide to escape their increasingly volatile city through a portal.

After a few adventures, they end up among a community of refugees in Kensington and Chelsea who are packed like sardines in the smart, empty houses rarely used by their well-to-do jet-setter owners.

But as the military move in and sections of the public demand that the immigrants be slaughtered wholesale, Nadia wonders “whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not”.

This is a short novel, given the air of a fable by the deliberately old-fashioned narrative voice but, as in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Hamid employs an eccentric style with bursts of magical realism.

Hamid is far too subtle a writer to labour political points, but in the end the reader cannot help but feel outraged that all over the world, love stories as touching, funny and offbeat as that of Saeed and Nadia are being shunted off their natural courses by the madness of war and the pitiful response of the Western world to the plight of refugees.

Jake Kerridge

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The central character in Ross Raisin’s third novel is that rarest of creatures, a professional footballer with more sense than money. At least, that’s the sort of joke I might have made before reading A Natural.

But the novel makes it harder to peddle stereotypes. Raisin’s novel emphasises that footballers have personalities and intelligence levels of many different shades and shapes. With its far-from-glamorous setting, the book also reminds us that for many players, life is a hard slog that’s far from the Premier League’s riches.

Tom Pearman is a shy and intelligent 19 year old who, as a player for the England under-18 squad, seemed to have a bright future ahead of him.

But his luck has deserted him and the book begins with him arriving in a town he’s never heard of to play for a fourth-division team. No equivalent of Beckingham Palace for

Tom: he lodges with two other players in the house of a nice middle-aged couple.

The team’s neurotic manager Clarke, a man with “a charisma bypass”, wastes Tom’s talent by keeping him on the bench, but what could really put the kibosh on his career is his increasingly close relationship with Liam, the club’s groundskeeper. Tom knows that if he comes out as gay, he won’t survive in a sport where a large proportion of the fans, players and management make cavemen look progressive.

Raisin has been much praised in the past for finding ways to create an eloquent inner voice for characters who are not themselves articulate, from a teenage delinquent in God’s Own Country (2008) to a homeless man in Waterline (2011).

He does a similar thing here for lonely, confused Tom, finding the language to express feelings that he himself can barely understand. The book lacks some of the rich, expressive diction of Raisin’s previous novels but its more low-key style suits a book that resists numerous opportunities for melodrama to tell a believable story about ordinary people.

He also movingly explores serious themes and captures the sensation we felt when we devoured the Roy Of The Rovers or Striker comic strips – that is, making us care about the relegation prospects of a fictional football club. With this book, it feels like the football novel has grown up. If only the game would follow its example.

Jake Kerridge

VERDICT: 4/5

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A Crime In The Family by Sacha Batthyány (Quercus, £16.99)

At her mansion on the Hungarian border in spring 1945, Countess Margit Batthyány gave a party for German aristocrats and SS officers who danced the night away in the knowledge that the Second World War was lost.

Later that night, her guests murdered 180 enslaved Jewish labourers, and this atrocity remained secret until Margit’s journalist great-nephew uncovered it years later.

In this riveting memoir of truth and reconciliation, he confronts the barbarity at the heart of his family history and its consequences for those alive now. Translated from the German by the excellent Anthea Bell.

Travelling With Ghosts: A Memoir Of Love And Loss by Shannon Leone Fowler (W&N, £14.99)

In 2002, during a backpacking trip to Thailand, Fowler and her Australian fiancé Sean were embracing in shallow waters when he was stung by a box jellyfish. Fowler watched helplessly as Sean died in front of her.

In this courageous memoir of love and loss, the “shattered and untethered” Fowler journeys on alone, trying to make sense of this random calamity in places that have witnessed their own tragedies, including Auschwitz, Israel and Sarajevo.

It’s a compelling account of learning to be a widow then moving on from widowhood.

The Facts Of Life by Paula Knight (Myriad, £16.99)

This poignant graphic memoir explores what it takes to be a mother and what it takes not to be one. Semi-autobiographical, it charts the emotional journey of Polly as she tries to accept that her plans to have children, nurtured since childhood, will be unfulfilled due to infertility.

Sweetly funny and painful by turns, it’s the perfect “non-Mother’s Day” gift for any woman who has not taken the path of parenthood, whether by choice or not.

Once We Were Sisters by Sheila Kohler (Canongate, £14.99)

Maxine and Sheila Kohler grew up planning grand lives for themselves amid the suffocating privileges of 1950s apartheid South Africa. But many years later, Maxine is killed after her husband drives their car off the road.

Sheila returns to South Africa, taking with her a cargo of unanswered questions about her sister’s sudden suspicious death and the misogyny and deep unhappiness that dogged their married lives. She tells their turbulent, parallel stories in this engrossing and beautifully written memoir.

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Everywoman: One Woman’s Truth About Speaking The Truth by Jess Phillips (Hutchinson, £14.99)

Part memoir, part feminist rallying cry, this is a bracing, engaging read that draws on Jess Phillips’ experiences of growing up in a radical socialist family and being elected as the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley.

From living on benefits when her children were small, to dealing with opposition heckles in the House of Commons, she tells home truths about the lives of women today with chapters about sisterhood, motherhood, careers and equality.

Everywoman is published ahead of International Women’s Day on Wednesday.